Employment record-keeping and retention in Canada

Record-keeping pulls in two directions at once. Employment standards legislation requires employers to keep specified records for a set period. Privacy law requires that personal information not be retained beyond the purpose it was collected for. Employers who notice only the first obligation accumulate everything forever; employers who notice only the second delete material they were required to hold. Both are compliance failures.

What generally has to be kept

• Identifying and start-date information for each employee.
• Hours worked, wages paid, and the deductions applied.
• Vacation and holiday entitlements taken and owing.
• Leaves taken, and any agreements about hours or overtime arrangements.
• Records relating to the end of employment, including what was paid and when.

Retention periods and the precise list vary by jurisdiction, and payroll and tax records carry their own separate requirements. Look up the periods that apply to you rather than adopting a single number for everything.

Keep the record findable, not just stored

A retained record you cannot locate provides no protection. Inspections and claims arrive with deadlines, and an employer who cannot produce the relevant file within them is in much the same position as one who never kept it. Structure matters more than volume: one place per employee, consistent naming, and a clear rule about what belongs in the personnel file versus a manager’s own notes.

Sensitive categories need tighter handling

Medical and accommodation information should be held separately from the general personnel file, with access limited to those who genuinely need it. The same applies to investigation material about harassment or misconduct. Over-broad internal access to these categories is a common finding against employers and is straightforward to avoid at the point where the file is set up.

Building a retention schedule that resolves the conflict

The way to reconcile the two obligations is to stop treating "the employee file" as a single object with a single lifespan. Break it into categories, and give each one a retention period derived from the rule that governs it:

• Payroll and hours records, governed by employment standards and tax requirements, which typically run from the end of the employment or the tax year rather than from the date each entry was made.
• Contractual documents, kept while any claim arising from them remains possible.
• Medical and accommodation material, held only as long as the accommodation and any related obligation continues, then disposed of on schedule.
• Investigation records, retained on their own basis given the possibility of later proceedings.
• Recruitment material for candidates who were not hired, which usually has the shortest justified life of anything on this list.

Write the schedule down, assign an owner by role, and make disposal something that happens on a cycle rather than when storage runs short. A schedule that is applied inconsistently is harder to defend than a generous one applied uniformly, because the exceptions are what get examined.

Two things that override the schedule

The first is a legal hold. Once a dispute is live or reasonably anticipated, routine disposal of anything touching it has to stop, even where the retention period has expired. Destroying relevant material after a claim is foreseeable is a materially worse problem than having kept it, and the fact that a scheduled process did it automatically is not much of an answer. Make sure whoever runs the disposal cycle can suspend it, and that someone is responsible for telling them to.

The second is an employee's right to access their own information, which exists in some form under the privacy regime that applies to you. Requests tend to arrive at the least convenient moment, often alongside a dispute, and the response is easier when records are organized by person and category than when they are scattered across mailboxes and shared drives. Structuring the file well is what makes both obligations manageable at once.

Records held in systems you do not own

Most employment records now live in software — payroll platforms, applicant tracking systems, shared drives, messaging tools. That does not move the obligation anywhere. The employer remains accountable for information it collects about its employees regardless of which vendor stores it, and a retention schedule that only governs the filing cabinet governs almost nothing.

• Know where each category of record actually lives, including copies that accumulate in mailboxes and chat history.
• Check what your agreement with each vendor says about retention, deletion, and what happens to the data if the relationship ends.
• Confirm whether the applicable privacy regime constrains where information may be stored or processed, and whether you have to disclose that to employees.
• Review access permissions on the same cycle as the retention schedule — access granted for a project and never revoked is the most common quiet exposure.
• Make sure departing managers' files and notes are captured, rather than leaving the only record of a performance history in an individual's personal storage.

Write down a retention schedule that reflects both obligations, apply it consistently, and suspend deletion for anything touched by a live or reasonably anticipated dispute. Dutiva keeps generated documents and their history in one place; the retention decisions themselves stay yours.